Calls have been made for Dorset Council to concentrate on achieving value for money from its services.

Weymouth councillor David Gray says that it needs to be the key objective of the council – especially with difficult financial times ahead because of additional spending on the Covid 19 crisis.

“For me the frustration is that we don’t have value for money at the heart of what we do... the financial pressure we will be under post lockdown will be severe,” he told the council’s audit and scrutiny committee.

He suggested that ‘value for money’ ought to be included in almost every document the council produced, although he said the term should not be confused with ‘cutting services.’

Fellow Weymouth councillor Brian Heatley said the authority also needs to concentrate on delivering services well and knowing what its targets were.

He said he believed that because the council has only been in operation for a little over a year it had been slow to make obvious what its aims and objectives actually are – making it difficult to achieve meaningful measurements: “We don’t seem to have a system which tells us whether we are meeting the things in our (corporate) plan,” he said.

He was also critical of changes made to audit and scrutiny committees half-way through the year which he said had not been reflected in a draft annual report.

Dorchester councillor Richard Biggs emphasised the importance of linking key performance indicators to the council’s corporate plan, although he believed the council had made a good start in doing this.

The online committee heard that methods were being developed to improve on ways of displaying important changes and to show easily where the council might be drifting off its targets.

Work is also underway on ‘positive indicators’ where the council can learn how to improve its performance from things which have gone well. This includes the council’s recent reaction to the pandemic where 2,500 staff had started working from home within the space of three days and how operations to help the community had been quickly put into place.

Other factors seen as positive include less staff travel and fewer meetings, with those which are still needed largely being held online.